On the discussions of diversity combination in multiuser cooperative networks

In multiuser cooperative networks, cooperative diversity can be obtained by the help of relays, whereas multiuser diversity is an inherent diversity exploited by properly designed multiuser scheduling algorithms. In this paper, we introduce a multiuser cooperative network aiming at the methods to achieve both forms of diversity. Two decode-and-forward (DF) based cooperation schemes are proposed, which focus on optimal outage performance and fair user scheduling, respectively. By analyzing the outage probability and symbol error probability (SEP), we point out that both schemes can achieve full diversity order, with the combination of cooperative diversity and multiuser diversity. Furthermore, to reveal the qualification of diversity combination, we resort to a more generalized network to show what lead to diversity lost by the fairness scheme. Numerical simulations are carried out finally, validating the correctness of our analysis.